F is for Fish
by chrystopher draco
Summary: Lee ponders the implications of asking Amanda to take care of his fish. A filler for Saved by the Bells.


TITLE: F is for Fish

AUTHOR: Chrystopher Spring 2004

RATING: PG

DISCLAIMER: "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" belong to Shoot the Moon and Warner Brothers. None of the characters are mine. I don't think I broke anything while I played with them, and I tried to put them back where I found them. This story is for entertainment only and not for profit. No infringement of rights is intended.

WARNING: None needed, I think.

NOTES: Written for the 2004 smkfanfic Alphabet Challenge, title courtesy Tiffany. Many thanks to my beta Lorna for her corrections, suggestions, and encouragement. It takes real dedication to start with "Lee sat down and for awhile thought awhile" and suggest gently that it could use more detail and less redundancy. She took my fuzzy images and polished them so they shine! (But the fish-spitting paragraph is all mine.)

GENRE: Canon, I hope.

TIMELINE: First Season, during "Saved by the Bells".

FEEDBACK: Email to smkfanfic list. Email to me. No flames, please: I have enough tension already on in my life. This is just for fun.

ARCHIVE: EmilyAnn may archive this in the SMKfanfic archives. Others please ask.

/ Indicates italics.

F is for Fish

Chrystopher Dragon

Lee kicked the door shut behind him, threw his keys on the counter, and sank onto his sofa. A flash of blue from the tank against the wall caught his eye, and suddenly the past two days collapsed down to a single defining moment.

/_"_

_So, um, can I count on you to take care of them while I'm away in Bermuda?"_

He was exhausted, but his own words echoed endlessly in his mind. Hunting Rostov had been exhilarating. He'd spent a long time pursuing the KGB agent behind his partner Eric's death. The Agency party after the capture had been a heady high of congratulations, teasing Francine, taking bows, teasing Francine, making jokes, teasing Francine, and keeping ghosts at bay. But when the party began to wind down, instead of the sense of closure he'd expected, Lee was only aware of a sense of depression.

Agents were heading back to their backlogs of cases. Even Francine returned to her desk and sat with her head bent, dutifully engaged in writing up her report of the capture, leaving him in awkward possession of the empty champagne bottle. He'd suddenly needed to get away to where he could forget about Scarecrow, forget about Rostov, forget about Eric. So he marched into Billy's office and delivered his ultimatum, took a final bow in response to the scattered applause from the party stragglers as he passed through the bullpen, and tossing his badge in Mrs. Marsden's general direction, almost ran out of the building. Once home, he easily ignored the inevitable end-of-a-case clutter in his apartment and concentrated on packing the essentials for a week in Bermuda.

Putting the phone on its hook as he finished making his reservations on the next available flight out of Dulles, his eye caught the twenty-gallon fish tank in the corner of the room. Gillian had insisted on giving it to him, Siamese fighting fish and weeds and burble and all, so that he'd have something serene and beautiful to look at when she was away. He'd not spent a lot of time staring at her fish once she'd gone on to other conquests; he'd easily found other, far more interesting and stimulating things to look at. But he did remember to feed them, and change their water occasionally.

A week was obviously too long to leave them alone. After a moment's reflection, he grabbed the phone to call the one dependable person he could think of: Amanda.

Sitting on his sofa an hour later, she had actually voiced his thought, "Good old reliable Amanda." He'd been slightly exasperated by her perceptive whine, and alarmed by her threat to clean up his apartment, although he freely admitted it needed it. Intent on his holiday, he ignored her sarcasm, bade the fish obey her, and took off for the airport, only to be pulled back into Billy's office by the two Agency operatives who were taller than he was.

Now, when it was all over, when he knew she was safe with her family, her words made him flush with guilt. He stared at the tank of fish, watching them swoop and turn, flit and float. They did not make him feel calm.

_"You're the only one I know that'll do it._

Of course, Amanda would do it.

Dirk had abandoned her to her fate. Billy had told him to be objective. Francine had followed orders.

Amanda would die for him.

But unlike Eric, it wouldn't be a professional taking a known risk; it would be because, however unlikely it seemed, she had become his friend, the only one who would feed his fish. For him, it couldn't get more personal.

"I can't live with this one," he'd said, standing in Billy's office.

Eric was gone, but he could still save Amanda. The thought had propelled him out of Billy's office and down to detention, to lurk until Jack had shown up with Rostov, then to grab Rostov and take him to the golf course to make the exchange. There had been a time when, given the chance to be alone with Rostov, Lee would have made sure the KGB agent never ate another burrito or saw Moscow again. Now he paid scant attention to Rostov's words, wondering instead if Amanda was hurt, or frightened, or even knew why she had been kidnapped.

Later, sitting in the golf cart untying her, hugging her as she cried, he realized he had never been so scared in his life. Her first words had confirmed his fears. She'd known. She'd been terrified.

She hadn't given him away.

He'd figured that out, eventually. She'd protested fervently to her kidnappers that she wasn't Scarecrow, she'd shown every piece of evidence she could find to prove it, but she had never let on that she knew who the real Scarecrow was. It had simply not crossed her mind that she might trade his life for hers.

Tightening his hold on her, he told her it was over, but he knew better. He saw her safely back to her normal life behind the white picket fence and green shutters of the house on Maplewood with as calm a face as he could manage, but his mind was forming plans and discarding one after another. Flying through his apartment, grabbing his workout clothes and shoving them in his athletic bag as he listened for Billy's trappers, he'd avoided looking at the fish tank, knowing he'd forfeited his chance for serenity for a long time to come. He'd simply collected clothes and cash and headed to the athletic club to wait until he could contact his "family" and figure out what to do next.

Now, with the ordeal over, he stared at the tank, as if following the path of the flitting fish could help him answer the questions flitting through his mind.

Why had she done it?

"_Well, it demonstrates your loyalty to your partner."_

She wasn't his partner. He wasn't hers. Loyalty was something that intelligence agencies jettisoned as soon as it was no longer practical.

Amanda was eminently practical, a divorced mother of two who ran a household on a part-time salary and child support, without alimony. He'd learned that as he reviewed the background checks for her security clearance and been surprised. In his experience, people took what they could get from broken relationships, but she'd deliberately refused something many women considered their due. She had a streak of pride and independence that perhaps rivaled his own.

But, as he was discovering, her loyalty overrode her practicality. Her phone call to the athletic club had caught him by surprise. He hadn't realized how closely she noticed what he did outside the agency, or how much she cared. Nor had she hesitated once Francine had told her the truth. As soon as she realized he faced a charge of treason, she'd dropped her preparations for Jamie's birthday party, left the safety of her normal life, and pitted herself against the forces that threatened him.

Her indignation that the Agency would brand him a traitor warmed him. At the same time, her ineptness at getting tailed frustrated him. He'd turned down her offer to help as a matter of course: he was a loner. But the agents in the dark car made him realize that she was right. He needed someone to help. He needed Amanda to help.

Now, he watched as one great blue fish swam to the bottom of the bowl, its mouth gulping and squirting water. The small rock chips on the bottom of the tank scattered in front of it, making small tinkling noises like faint bells as they struck the glass.

Chip by chip, the fish was changing its world. Bit by bit, Amanda was breaking down his carefully constructed personal citadel. He leaned back and turned out the light on the end table, so that the only glow in the living room came from the light in the fish tank.

"_Men, this is Amanda King. She'll be taking care of you. Now, you do everything she says, huh?"_

She'd taken care of him, and he done everything she told him to. He'd followed the singing birds and the laughter of the playing children, the barking dogs, and the bells. He'd gone to the house she found, examined the cabinets, looked at the bookshelves, feeling more foolish as every insistent claim she made failed to produce any evidence that this was the place. Even when the bookshelf finally spun around, he'd been too slow to take advantage of the situation. So, he had not been prepared for his own flash of exultation at Zinoviev's astonishment that Amanda had found her way back to the KGB hideout.

And he'd followed her directions when she'd returned after making the call to Billy, alone and unarmed, and tricked Zinoviev into surrendering to "Scarecrow's assistant". He hadn't given her away.

As Scarecrow, she'd done him proud.

In his darkened apartment, sitting on his sofa and remembering, he smiled. In the tank, the fish danced on their tails, gulping at the surface of the water.

_"Believe me, I really do appreciate this."_

When Billy had arrived with a backup team, Lee took him aside and pointed out that Amanda's statement should wait; she was needed at home. Missing Jamie's party would simply create the kind of family inquiry the Agency didn't need if it wanted to continue using her services. Billy's eyebrows shot up with amusement when Lee voiced this argument, but he made no reply to it, and instead, merely agreed to send Amanda home with instructions to report in the next day to finish debriefing. Billy then personally escorted Lee back to the Agency, shoving him into his own office and telling him to stay put while he went to see Dirk.

Lee spent the first thirty minutes of his wait pacing from one side of Billy's office to the other and glancing at the military guard Billy placed at the door. He was not quite sure whether the guard was there to protect him from the Deputy Director's displeasure or prevent him from escaping again. Despite Zinoviev's capture, they had lost Rostov, and Dirk was very unhappy.

Lee knew he could still face treason charges, but his overriding emotion was a sense of relief. Amanda was safe, at home, putting the finishing touches on Jamie's party, which would be just perfect if only that clown showed up. She had saved his life, and he did appreciate it. With one eye on the guard and the door, Lee hunted around Billy's office shelves until he found a phone book. He paged hurriedly through it, looking for Party Services. Finding the number he wanted, he put through a call, with perhaps a bit more intensity than necessary, and finished just as Billy walked in. Turning to greet his boss with a falsely bright smile, he waited for the words that would end his espionage career.

That hadn't happened. Dirk had reluctantly agreed to reinstatement. Lee had gone home, to sit on the sofa and try to make sense of the last 48 hours by staring at his fish tank.

It was very late when Lee finally got up from the sofa and headed to the bathroom to change for bed. The blinking light on the answering machine caught his attention and he hit the replay button as he continued on into the bathroom, but Amanda's voice stopped him in his tracks.

"Lee? Are you there? I guess you aren't there because you'd answer if you were but since you don't, maybe you're at the athletic club. I figured you'd forget that Zinoviev's men took the fish food so I bought some and left it next to the tank in the living room since I've still got a key. I fed them just before those men grabbed me -- did I tell you they had cold hands? I don't understand why. Anyway, you're supposed to feed the fish every two days and I fed them just after you left, so it's been two days. You really should feed them. I need to go get Jamie's cake out of the oven, but I'll see you Monday if you don't go to Bermuda but if you do, don't forget your tennis racket." She paused as though there as something else she wanted to say, then finished almost lamely, "Bye, then."

He shut off the answering machine and moved slowly into the bathroom to stare at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He looked different. He felt different. He had, after all, achieved an odd sense of peace, and he was absolutely certain it had nothing to do with watching fish swimming in the tank.

_"Is there anything else I need to tell you?"_

Yes, there was. Just not yet.

He' snapped off the bathroom light and headed back to the living room. He'd never get any sleep unless he fed those damn fish first.

Lee's former partner is never named in the series, but many fanfics use "Eric", so I followed tradition. During the first capture sequence, Lee says that he's been after Rostov for a long time, but "Saved by the Bells" doesn't explain why. Later on, when Lee tells Billy he can't live with "this one" (someone dying in his place), it seems a clear reference to his partner's death, so I made Rostov the agent involved in Eric's death.

The fish food Lee has is for Siamese fighting fish (also known as bettas). These are blue or purple or greeny-blue, and the males usually have to be kept in separate containers. I left them in one tank, since the episode was written that way, but you shouldn't.


End file.
